Design & Emotion Blog

Being a market leader for home appliances and with a 100+ year history, Miele has shown once again its edge and dedication to its brand and products by designing an innovative and intelligent boutique showroom.

FAK3 founded by Johnny Wong, a graduate of the prestigious Royal College of Art London, is an innovative design studio based in Hong Kong and Barcelona, focusing on Architecture, interiors, branding, product and fashion. Miele has commissioned them; to design a space to showcase their high end and most advanced products.

‘With over 30 plus Miele showrooms globally spanning from Beverly Hills to Korea. Each retail space is localized and unique. This was a great opportunity to push the boundaries, by creating an environment which reflected Hong Kong’s culture and to define a shopping experience which can add an emotional engagement between the product and consumer through our design.’ explains Wong.

The direction was to create a series of thematic spaces, which resonates from the products and showcases the wide spectrum of possibilities on how Miele can enhance one’s home

To begin with FAK3 created a stunning super slick shop front, christen the ‘Miele Horizon’. The curtain wall façade is a unique red to black reflective graduation glass, hand crafted in Guangzhou, China.

Which like a mist filled, crystal prism off Hysan Avenue, an exclusive fashion focused shopping area, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Louis Vuitton’s, Hermes and the Channels.

The existing site is spatially complex and is composed of many ‘strange corners’, which FAK3 used intelligently as an opportunity in defining each thematic zone. The centerpiece of the interior is a ‘Rock Island’, with embedded Miele products. The island seems visually carved from one monolithic piece of beige marble and has an integrated motorized mechanism that can slide out its lower portion measuring 4 metres long, with more hidden high end products showcased in stone.

The ‘Miele Mirage’ is a digital image archive of all products, which is a tool for staff to access virtual products that can be demonstrated to customers instantly. It is an adjunct marble cabinet next to the ‘Rock Kitchen’, with a hidden floor to ceiling stone panel that can be swung open, revealing a family of products.

Juxtaposed next to them is full height silver glass wall, which is a screen displaying, 1:1 scale virtual images of all of Miele products. In the opposite end of the boutique, half floating in-between two spaces is the ‘Cobalt bar’ a super reflective blue mirrored steel block housing cooling products, such a the glass wine cooling cabinets and next to it is the ‘Powder room’, themed as a boudoir of mirrors, which concentrates on more laundry care products.

Finally, the ‘D’lounge’, is a coffee topic zone. The coffee table is an interactive element with back projected, mixed media film footage, acting like digital ‘table cloth’, with constant changing colours and patterns. The Miele coffee maker anchors the space together with FAK3’s own stackable ‘Baby Bird’ chairs which they design solely for the Boutique.

With the whole footprint of the boutique being less than 1000sqft, its full big ideas and leading edge technology that pack a punch. Showrooms for the home appliances industry in Hong Kong has been shaken up dramatically, and a new horizon for exciting retail environments are beginning to take shape.

Wong concludes. “The products radiate the space —the space takes inspiration from the products and their potential. It doesn’t treat products as machines. It creates an emotional engagement with the products and helps one envision a lifestyle.”

This project seems like another good example of the importance of the whole experience in shopping (also see what Paul Bennet from IDEO had to say about this >>). With the enormous amount of high end quality products, it is clearly becoming more important to differentiate yourself from others in new ways. For more information on FAK3, please visit their website www.fak3.com or contact Johny Wong ([email protected])